Series: Interviews

I learned a very cool technique for profiling my application recently for performance tuning from a post on Stackoverflow. It can be used for most programming languages, does not require any special tools, and is more intuitive to use that many profilers that give you a summary view of some sort. I hunted down the author of that SO post - Mike Dunlavey, and had a nice chat with him. Enjoy! Mike's Stackoverflow post can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1796715/5304. He also published a paper on it, which can be found here: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/mike-dunlavey/performance.pdf.

Watch “Random Sample-Based Profiling with Mike Dunlavey”

I had a nice chat with Mike Dunlavey about CS education, teaching newcomers to code and the challenges CS teachers commonly face and some ways we deal with those challenges.

Watch “CS Education Chat with Mike Dunlavey”

I have further conversations with Mike Dunlavey about various topics in computer science, including information theory, AI, knowledge representation, languages, and macros.

Watch “Punching Through on Computer Science with Mike Dunlavey”

Bil Lewis published an influential paper in 2003 called "Debugging Backwards in Time". It inspired me and others to build time traveling debuggers of their own. The debugger he built was called ODB, or the Omniscient debugger, implemented for Java. I was very lucky to get to chat with him over zoom, ask him some questions, and even have him demo the ODB to me. We had an amicable chat. The source code of ODB can be found at https://github.com/OmniscientDebugger/LewisOmniscientDebugger, and his paper can be found at http://www.cs.kent.edu/~farrell/mc08/lectures/progs/pthreads/Lewis-Berg/odb/AADEBUG_Mar_03.pdf. Also, he once did a talk at Google which was recorded and published here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpI8hIgOyko.

Watch “Omniscient Debugging (ODB) With Bil Lewis”

I have the great pleasure of speaking to Robert O'Callahan (roc), the creator of the rr record/replay debugger and co-founder of Pernosco. We talk about the origins of his various projects, how they work, what they mean for the software industry, and more. roc's blog - https://robert.ocallahan.org/ rr - https://rr-project.org/ roc's rr talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4iNuufAe_8 Pernosco - https://pernos.co/ Chromometer paper - https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/xyzhang/fall07/Papers/Amber.pdf My videos about rr - https://tobyho.com/video-series/rr-debugger.html

Watch “Time-Travel Debugging with Robert O'Callahan”